CMS surveys nursing homes across dozens of regulatory requirements organized under F-tags, ranging from resident rights to staffing ratios to infection control documentation. A nursing home that doesn't have a systematic compliance checklist doesn't find out about gaps during a self-audit — it finds out from a surveyor.
This guide gives you the compliance framework organized by domain, with the specific checklist items that matter most during a CMS survey. The free download below covers the top-priority checks across all six domains. Department-specific bundles give you the actual printable forms to document your compliance every day.
Free Nursing Home Compliance Checklist
Enter your email and we'll send you the Survey Day Readiness Checklist — 6 sections, 35+ checks, covering all major compliance areas. Instant delivery.
F725 / F726 — Staffing & Competency Records
CMS F725 Requires You to Track Every Staff Certification — Do You Know Who’s Expiring?
The checklist above shows what surveyors check. The Staff Training Tracker keeps every staff member’s certifications, completion dates, and expiration alerts in one dashboard — so you can prove compliance before surveyors ask. 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Track Every Certification Before Survey Day →No credit card required • 14-day free trial • Cancel anytime
The 6 Domains of Nursing Home Compliance
CMS evaluates nursing home compliance across dozens of F-tags, but they cluster into six core domains. A gap in any domain can result in a deficiency — and deficiencies in high-severity domains (IJ, G, or above) trigger penalties that now appear publicly on Nursing Home Care Compare.
Every compliance program should have a working checklist for each of these six areas:
Nursing & Clinical Care
Care plans, medication management, fall prevention, wound care, incident documentation. The highest-scrutiny domain in any standard survey.
Dietary & Nutrition
Food safety temperatures, special diet accuracy, kitchen sanitation, tray line quality, and Dietary Manager oversight documentation.
Infection Prevention & Control
IPCP program, hand hygiene compliance, PPE use, isolation protocols, antibiotic stewardship, and monthly surveillance reporting.
Staffing & Workforce
CMS minimum staffing ratios, PBJ reporting accuracy, staff competency records, call-out logs, and license currency verification.
QAPI Program
Active performance improvement projects, root cause analyses, QAPI committee meeting minutes, and measurable outcome tracking.
Administration & Documentation
Required postings, grievance logs, resident rights documentation, advance directives, and abuse prevention policy compliance.
Most survey citations don't come from single isolated failures. They come from systemic documentation gaps — a care plan problem that links to a medication administration problem that links to an incident report problem. The F-tag mapping above shows which tags are interconnected. Fixing F655 (care plans) often surfaces F689 (fall prevention) and F758 (psychotropic meds) gaps on the same resident. A compliance program that audits in silos misses the connections.
Nursing Department Compliance Checklist 💉
Nursing is where most surveys are decided. CMS surveyors spend the majority of their time in nursing, reviewing care plans, observing medication passes, checking fall and wound documentation, and interviewing residents about their care. The checklist below covers the items most likely to result in a citation when they're missing or inadequate.
Dietary Department Compliance Checklist 🍴
Dietary is consistently in the top 10 deficiency areas nationally. Surveyors conduct a tray line observation during every standard survey, review temperature logs for the past 90 days, and look for documented staff training on food safety. The three most common dietary citations are food temperature violations, special diet errors, and missing sanitation logs.
Infection Control Compliance Checklist 🦠
F880 (Infection Prevention and Control Program) is the most frequently cited F-tag nationally, appearing in approximately 74% of SNF surveys with deficiencies. Most citations come from three gaps: no written surveillance data, missing staff training records, and observed PPE practices that contradict the facility's written policy. For the complete department-by-department infection control checklist, see our infection control checklist for nursing homes.
Staffing Compliance Checklist 📅
CMS issued minimum staffing requirements in 2024 requiring 3.48 hours of total nurse staffing per resident day, with 0.55 hours of RN staffing and 2.45 hours of CNA staffing daily. Facilities below these thresholds face citation risk. Beyond minimum ratios, surveyors check PBJ data accuracy, staff competency records, and call-out pattern documentation.
QAPI Compliance Checklist 📊
CMS requires every nursing home to have a written, ongoing QAPI program — not a binder that gets updated before survey. Surveyors ask to see active Performance Improvement Projects (PIPs), recent QAPI committee minutes, and evidence that the facility is using data to drive improvement. Most QAPI programs fail inspection because they exist on paper but not in practice.
Get the Full Compliance Kits for Your Team
The free checklist above gives you the framework. The FacilityKit department bundles give you the actual printable forms, logs, tracking sheets, and audit tools your team uses every day to document compliance. Every document is CMS-aligned, designed for immediate use, and formatted for binders and daily workflows.
Mock Survey Kit
10 printable self-audit documents for department-by-department compliance self-assessment. Includes surveyor question guides.
Infection Control Bundle
Hand hygiene audits, PPE tracking, surveillance logs, antibiotic stewardship forms, and isolation protocols for all four departments.
Nursing Department Bundle
MAR templates, wound care tracking, fall prevention protocols, incident report templates, care plan tools, and competency checklists.
Dietary Department Bundle
Temperature logs, kitchen sanitation checklists, diet tracking sheets, tray line audit forms, and meal prep schedules.
Staffing Bundle
7-day shift schedules, PBJ worksheet, staffing matrix calculator, call-out logs, competency checklists, and new hire orientation tracker.
Survey Survival Bundle
The complete survey preparation package: mock survey kit + plan of correction templates + guidance on the most common deficiency areas.
For facilities approaching their annual survey window, the Survey Survival Bundle ($99) covers both sides of the survey: the pre-survey self-audit (mock survey kit) and the post-survey corrective action workflow (plan of correction templates). If you're 90 days or less from your anticipated survey date, this is the highest-value starting point.